Thou Shalt Not Adore False Gods
by Reyavie
Summary: He never thought that, by showing her the truth, she would search for another path. He had been amused then, unconscious of his mistake. But Jibrile knew and she learned. Enough to search for her revenge.


She was two. The face belonged to the angel who had been loved and hated by Heaven but the words were sorely from the human trapped inside it. The strength was the same, the conviction, the feeling within every action hadn't changed with the years, death and reincarnation. A hand raised in defiance, head held high, eyes almost painfully clear. Gabriel was still the same, no matter how many memories she had lost. In her guise, Sara shone with a new light. Taking from the angel's soul, she voiced all the horror they had passed, the injustices Gabriel had been pushed to.

The second showed how little she knew about the Archangel.

Gabriel had chosen her path. Despite the betrayal, she had known the danger she was going to face. She had known it since the day he had walked out of that room, his words still resonating in the fresh air, stabbing her heart again and again, as he had intended. Truth always hurt.

He hadn't seen the elemental rise against those polluting Heaven. Trapped in a crystal sword, he could see little past his master, learn little of the outside world except through her eyes. But, somehow, he had known. For Gabriel, her whole world had been crumbling beneath her feet. Values she had taken as certain ever since a child were misused, abused horribly to the point where they meant nothing. A hideous caricature of what they had once been. So what if her actions wouldn't amount anything? So what, if she had to step back, hide behind vacant smiles and stray away from those closest to her?

Placing herself in the spotlight was to draw attention from others. Making herself a target was to buy time, to allow someone stronger to fight that battle.

Lucifer had no idea why those thoughts came to his mind, so long before seeing the Archangel. It that particular moment, the body moving in front of his eyes couldn't be Gabriel, loud and boastful, so young in its countenance. But it was Gabriel's hand rising in the direction of Sevotharte, it was her voice still yelling…

_You know nothing about me!_

He gave her the awareness, confident of what would mean. She had taken it with precision, grasping it like a lifeline.

_I can't do anything!_

Pathetic weakling. Walking carelessly down her path as if there was no other place to turn, sacrificing herself for those who knew not who she was, who cared little by the elemental's entrapment. Not even her reincarnation had changed.

Sara had stopped shouting abruptly, words halted by pure fear as she was confronted by the same power she had once possessed. He could see her terrified face from his place next to Rosiel, her laboured breathing, her…faint smile.

Blue eyes rose to meet his unwaveringly, almost amused. None seemed to notice as time apparently stopped, ruling over the trial as if Adam Kadamon himself had dropped by. In that moment, there were two souls alive in that room, his dead soul and the deceased one. In that moment, silent fell with abrupt sharpness, taking over everything without a single action against it. In the next moment, his eyes closed and all he could see was darkness.

--- xXx ---

"Maybe I shouldn't have listened to your words that day." When he was able to see once again, the room he was standing had morphed into something else. More light than the one he was used to, brimming from every surface and object, a small room where the only furniture was the chair he was sitting on and a small coffee table, dividing the space between him and an equal chair. The soft scent of water floated in the air, filling his nostrils and consuming everything else. He knew that place.

Just as he knew the one sitting opposed to him.

It couldn't he her. It just couldn't. She was _dead_.

"Would I change my past, knowing what I know now?" The half smile she had shown in the courtroom hadn't changed. It seemed to have grown. Gabriel, the Great Cherubim, stood before him, occupying the chair vacant a moment before. She sat still, arms resting against the wood of the furniture beneath them, back straight and pleasant expression, a ruler allowing her subject an audience.

He was under no one. Dead were above no one. "Sara?" Even Lucifer couldn't avoid curiosity about the matter. Despite the fact that the girl had been using Gabriel's body, the one in the court room had been Sara. There was no way to mistake them. But the woman in front of him simply couldn't be the human.

Gabriel barely moved, barely reacted except for her almost mocking smile. "I am Sara and yet, she is not me," she answered, not really saying anything, in Lucifer's opinion. "Just as you are Kira and he is not you." Meddling in things she should leave asleep and resting. Indeed, the elemental had changed since the last time he had seen her. No wonder Sevotharte had considered her a threat, considering the words that left her lips.

"As her, I have learned what Gabriel wasn't able to see." Hands curled against the wood of the chair's arms, fingers slowly digging into the material before opening abruptly, as if their owner had just noticed the gesture. "I learned angels aren't as lenient as they made themselves to be. That betrayal runs deep in our blood, hidden beneath layers and layers of hypocrisy." Slowly, Gabriel leaned over to the table between them.

In it, rested a small set of porcelain, a tea service he would have failed to see if she hadn't pointed it out with her gestures. Or maybe he wouldn't have seen it if she hadn't wished it? Gabriel was precise as she moved, serving a cup of tea as if they were both in Etenamenki, in the gardens that had been her home.

It gave him time to think. Why had she brought him there, anyway? Why not Raphael, the one who had been protecting her barely moments before? Uriel, who had raised his voice for the first time in centuries to save her? In the mist of the silence, the porcelain clashed gently, its sound faint, like it came for a place far away from both of them.

His questions remained unsaid. Her answers were never born, her half-smile ever-present.

"I don't need your knowledge."

That smile said everything, strangely enough. It said she knew he had learned the same lessons years before her, knowledge he had smacked into her face in that day, while she flew above her garden and cried with those who couldn't shed tears. Her hands moved again, abandoning the cups and the pretence of normalcy.

She knew he knew. "Michael told me about you." Anyone else would have reacted, considering what those simple words implied, snapped at her for daring to touch such a subject. But Lucifer was darkness and darkness was nothing but patient.

"He told me how he hated you. How your betrayal filled him with disgust and shame, something he will not be able to forget, no matter how many years pass. It was obvious he didn't understand you. And neither did I."

Gabriel rose from her chair, graceful movements flowing into each other, so gentle, almost captivating. Alexiel had had the same talent. Every room the organic angel had entered stopped, its occupants searching the source of the power pulling them to it, awe in every face and mind. But where Alexiel had been forceful, imprinting her presence with undeniable strength, Gabriel was elegant, steering attention to her with barely any effort.

"You hurt me then." She wasn't tall. Sitting as he was, though, the small woman towered over him as a goddess of old. "I wished to ignore the words you had spoken, prayed for oblivion in order to ignore the truth they carried." Had that been the reason for his presence there? To blame him for her trials? A coward's action. "But a blind man cannot wish for darkness once he has seen the light. I was no exception."

Hands touched his face without permission. He should have killed her then, it wouldn't have been hard, elemental or not. But her hands were real while they shouldn't have been, her touch gentle instead of murderous, her words true, without the underlying lies spreading through Heaven and Hell.

"Thank you, Lucifel." Not even the use of his angel name or the expression of her gratitude shocked him as much as the touch of her lips against his forehead, care none was supposed to show or feel towards him. Care he didn't wish from anyone bar another woman. Gabriel was supposed to hate him, abhor him. What was the play she was performing?

The next moment found him in the noisy courtroom, standing next to Rosiel as nothing more than a statue, like so many existent in the halls. The Water Gardens had vanished, taking with them the vision of a time long gone.

In the level bellow stood the one whose words persisted in his mind, much the same as he had done to her so long before. He had never known the soft-spoken elemental was so vengeful.

"Lady Gabriel, are you all right?" The woman smiled thankfully to the ignorant angel offering her aid, smiled as she thanked Raphael, smiled with her own act as Gabriel fell asleep and Sara took over.

Of the whole room, only he understood that smile. Two birds had been killed with one stone. An enemy destroyed and the other mutilated.

She had her vengeance.

She had won.


End file.
